They are actually reinstating the payment policy to farmers not to grow opium. Heroine prices are low and abuse is high because of the availability and it's much cheaper than prescription painkillers. I'm afraid we're caught in a vicious cycle.

this piece is clearly mistitled but contains a little history speckled with hypotheticals and a somewhat misguided utopian conclusion but whatever i posted it for the overall lol it gave me.

How George W. Bush Screwed This Generation of College Students

Every kid in America could have a free public college education right now if George W. Bush hadn't been such a war monger.

In early 2001, prior to the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban
government in Afghanistan issued an edict to ban opium cultivation in
that nation, saying it was a violation of Islam. (Opium is the raw material for heroin.)

And it worked pretty well.

In 2000, roughly 4,500 metric tons of opium was produced
in Afghanistan. In 2001, that number plummeted to less than 1,000
metric tons. The price of heroin went up around the world, and the
number of addicts – particularly in Europe, Russia, and America –
dropped.

While $43 million may not seem like a lot, it's important to put it in context.

At the time of the deal, Afghanistan's total GDP was just $2 billion,
putting it at the bottom of the global GDP rankings. It was, literally,
the poorest country in the world. So, for the Taliban, $43 million was a
lot of money.

George W. Bush's decision to fork over $43 million to the Taliban to
help curb drug trafficking, use, and abuse was actually a good choice,
and a smart policy.

Now fast forward to the days and weeks after 9/11.

On October 14th, 2001, a senior Taliban leader, Deputy Prime Minister Haji Abdul Kabir, sent an official offer to Washington,
saying that the Taliban would be willing to hand over Osama Bin Laden
to a third-party country, if the U.S. stopped the bombing of
Afghanistan.

Kabir said that, "If America were to step back from the current
policy, then we could negotiate. Then we could discuss which third
country."

But Bush, the same man who, just months earlier, had handed over a
small fortune to the Taliban government, rejected this latest offer of
cooperation.

Instead, he took up a "scorched earth" policy and bombed Afghanistan back into the stone ages.

In fact, every hour, the war in Afghanistan is costing We the People another $10.17 million.

The Taliban offered to hand over bin Laden on a silver platter, but
we said no, and now it's cost us hundreds of billions of dollars.

But what if George W. Bush had taken up the offer from the Taliban, and even sweetened the deal like he did with the opium?

What if he did something similar to what he had done just months
before, and offered to give the Taliban money, if they promised to cut
down on terrorism and on al Qaeda's presence and influence in that
nation?

We could have given the Taliban $2 billion, enough to double the
nation's GDP and make everybody in the country twice as wealthy, and it
still would have only been a drop in the bucket compared to what we've
spent on the war in Afghanistan.

And, if we had done that, we would have saved ourselves enough money
to provide a free public college education to every single eligible
student in America.

As The Atlantic points out,
according to Department of Education data, public colleges across
America collected $62.6 billion in tuition from undergrads in 2012.

That means that the federal government would only have had to spend
$62.6 billion to help make public college tuition free for every student
in America in 2012.

That's less than 11% of what we have spent on the war in Afghanistan.

The bottom-line here is that George W. Bush had a chance to get America's priorities right, and he failed.

Fortunately, he's not in Washington anymore.

So now, instead of spending trillions of dollars on prolonging the
Bush legacy of unjust wars, we should be spending those trillions on the
things that will make America great again, like giving every eligible
student in America a free public college education.

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